November 23, 2011

A new revolution is taking place in America — and it’s all happening on FaceBook. Does anyone but me find that a little bit weird?

After I “friended” Leah on FB, she sent me a video of U.C. Davis police torturing non-violent college students with pepper spray just because the poor students didn’t want their tuition to go up — again http://boingboing.net/2011/11/18/police-pepper-spraying-arrest.html. And now the video’s gone viral and everyone in the world can see how America treats its youth.

But who benefits most from state-supported higher education? Surprisingly, it isn’t the students. It’s the One Percent. Every year, corporatists get a whole new crop of shiny young geniuses to chew up and spit out — hopeful young graduates just begging big corporations to allow them to work in brain-numbing gray-flannel-suit corporate sweatshops.

Instead of having to educate and train their own peons themselves, corporatists now let the state do it. And they let the state pay for that training too.

So I immediately “liked” and shared Leah’s post.

“The One Percent just don’t get it,” I wrote back. “We have FaceBook (for now), so that all the evil secret stuff that corporatists could get away with 20 years ago is now being broadcast all over the world instantly — showing these bad guys up for what they actually are: People with NO FaceBook friends.”

“This could be the most important Constitutional amendment ever proposed since we eliminated slavery and gave women the vote! At the NY stock exchange, they have the GALL to fly an American flag. But then why not? They own America lock, stock and barrel. Your kids won’t get a college education. Their kids will.”

Then my FaceBook friend Saeed sent me an eye-witness video of the insane brutality that Israeli corporatists’ occupation forces perpetuate in Palestine — reminding me that our American college students could be treated that way too if we don’t watch out.

Oops, too late. They already are.

Saeed wrote on his News Feed, “Four demonstrators got shot in Ni’lin Village. The Israeli army used live bullets against non-violent demonstrators, and even before the demonstrators reached the apartheid wall, the army started shooting and suppressing the demo. Many demonstrators suffered a lot as a result of inhaling the tear gas too.” Here’s Saeed’s video, also now viral: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcTmmqQN7Vs.

Does that remind you of UC Davis? Or UC Berkeley? Or Kent State? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI7-m919ynU (From Larry — Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young singing about the four dead in Ohio, “soldiers are hunting us down…we’re finally on our own,” will bring tears to your eyes!)

Don’t you just love FaceBook?

On FB, you get real eye-witness news the moment that it happens — not that boiled down, censored crap that you get on TV.

I wonder how long FB will last before most of us real Americans, most of us 99%, will become “un-friended” by the corporatists. Mark Zuckerberg, this could be your moment to either be a patriot or a poodle. Be careful how you chose.

And next comes my post about the current labor movement in America: “Have you noticed that mostly the old and the young are coming out for Occupy America demonstrations? Could that be because America’s biggest employers, the coproratists, are holding the rest of us — afraid of losing our jobs and overwhelmed by credit-card debt — by the, er, short hairs?

“And there are also plans afoot to shut down all west-coast ports on December 6. Good. Let’s see how long America can last without its heroin-like addiction to foreign goods.

“PS: I’m old now — but not dead. Those longshoremen were cute!”

Then my friend Kristin wrote on FaceBook: “There are people, with tents, camping in front of Best Buy in Encino Hills right now for Black Friday. Camping. On. Cement. For. Days. Wow.”

“Isn’t anybody gonna pepper spray those people?” Ross C. replied.

And then I wrote this comment on my wall on November 22, a day that will live in infamy forever in my mind: “WHO KILLED JFK? Who had the means, the motive and the opportunity? Seriously? Kennedy’s death marked the major beginning point for the brutal corporatist take-over of our government, our country and the planet.”

1 Comment

Good points, Jane, especially about state colleges these days being the taxpayer-and-student supported training ground to work in corporate America, which many young people I’ve talked to resent. Worse is post-graduation when the new hires realize they have a short shelf-life as, increasingly, tech and lower-level management jobs are being sent overseas. They come in and design the system, work out the bugs, then are forced to train someone overseas who is earning half (or less) of what they are being paid in how to run it. Within five years, and often less time than that, they are out of a job. I can’t tell you how pissed off these kids are at being treated this way. I know many of them are out in the streets with OWS but many more support the OWS revolution behind the scenes in various ways. Fortunately, I think we are in the midst of a revolution that will have just as much of an impact on our broken ‘crapitalist’ system as the protests of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s had on civil rights, women’s rights, and ending the Vietnam War and the draft. My rough guess is for every one OWS protestor in the streets there are at least a hundred at home cheering them on. I’ll take those odds over the elite 1 Percent represented by Fox News, Wall Street, Mike Bloomberg and ‘get a job’ Newtie. The wealthy and corporations are abput to learn a lesson in evolution; it’s not that the strongest survive, as they mistakenly believe; it’s really adapt or die off, and most of them have been terrible at adapting to new circumstances in the past.